British producer and singer-songwriter, Dev Hynes (stage name, Blood Orange), who initially excelled at crafting spacey atmospheric pop songs that updated Michael Jackson for the re verb era, shifted towards the esoteric on 2018’s Blood Swan, a collage of melodic snippets, ambience and brief conceptual pieces. After a 7-year hiatus, the new modus is revived on Essex Honey, where he acts even closer to a curator and assembler rather than a songwriter. The album is partially another patchwork of melodic and rhythmic snippets, digital ideas, extra instrumentation and this time with an even more formidable list of collaborators (some of which are interpolations of older songs). Some of the tracks unfortunately fall back into mid-paced neo-soul, without the compelling melodies and cadences to boot.
The cross-section of styles and ideas is often to the detriment of coherence, for better or worse. For example, the moody drone, skittering beats, piano cadence and psalm-like humming in under 3 minutes on Look At You. The persistent clicking beat is the only anchor in Thinking Clean, which shifts from Hynes’ neo-soul crooning to a euphoric dance track. Mind Loaded is a dramatic neoclassical ballad with a repeating melodic line, featuring Lorde, Caroline Polachek and Mustafa and a (strikingly out of context) sample of Elliot Smith’s Everything Means Nothing to Me. These tracks form an unusual mixture of IDM and neo-soul.
More straightforward is Somewhere In Between once again harks back to the funk-soul and R&B of the 1980s with a harmonica accompaniment that blends the sultry and the pastoral and also elevated by a nocturnal jazzy intermezzo and a Celtic-like strings-backed outro. The Field, which samples legendary British post-punkers the Durutti Column, is a romantic croon over an exotic rhythm. The driving King Krule-esque The Train (also with Caroline Polachek) returns the mouth organ, embellished once again by Stevie Wonder-esque harmonica. Despite the painstaking arrangements, some of the other melodic tracks don’t fare as well like the limp, woodwind-infused Vivid Light, the slow, repetitive Countryside (featuring vocal contributions from Eva Tolkin, Liam Benzyi and Ian Isiah) and the unobtrusive, jazzy and ethereal Life (featuring alt-pop songwriter, Tirzah and Brazilian-Norwegian jazz singer and composer, Charlotte Dos Santos).
The album is front-loaded with the most compelling experiments. The half-baked collaborations break the momentum too much and the contributions often feel anonymous (such as the irrelevant contribution of Brendan Yates of Turnstile fame to Scared Of It). Like his last few projects, the best ideas are buried beneath too many skippable tracks and are a little too scant to justify the length. Nonetheless, the best tracks are among his most amorphous and daring experiments.
Released: 29 August, 2025
Label: RCA, Domino
Losing My Edge Rating: 6/10
Best Tracks: Look At You, Thinking Clean, Somewhere In Between, The Field